father's castle and forced their way in. Despite their refusal to take off their caps, the emperor listened to their story, only then removing their caps. The emperor executed his stepmother and took back his wife. Analysis The birth of the wonder-children The tale is classified in the international Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index as type ATU 707, "The Three Golden Children". Most versions of The Boys With Golden Stars begin with the birth of male twins, but very rarely there are fraternal twins, a boy and a girl. When they transform into human babies again, the siblings grow up at an impossibly fast rate and hide their supernatural trait under a hood or a cap. Soon after, they show up in their father's court or house to reveal the truth through a riddle or through a ballad. The motif of a woman's babies, born with wonderful attributes after she claimed she could bear such children, but stolen from her, is a common fairy tale motif; see "The Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird", "The Tale of Tsar Saltan", "The Three Little Birds", "The Wicked Sisters", "Ancilotto, King of Provino", and "Princess Belle-Etoile". Some of these variants feature an evil stepmother. The reincarnation motif The transformation chase where the stepmother is unable to prevent the children's reappearance is unusual, although it appears in "A String of Pearls Twined with Golden Flowers" and in "The Count's Evil Mother" (O grofu i njegovoj zloj materi), a Croatian tale from the Karlovac area, "The Pretty Little Calf" also has the child reappear, transformed after being murdered, but only has the transformation to an animal form and back to human. Daiva Vaitkevičienė suggested that the transformation sequence in the tale format (from human babies, to trees, to lambs/goats and finally to humans again) may be underlying a theme of reincarnation, metempsychosis or related to a life-death-rebirth cycle. This motif is shared by other tale types, and does not belong exclusively to the ATU 707. French scholar Gédeon Huet noted the "striking" (frappantes) similarities between these versions of ATU 707 and the Ancient Egyptian story of The Tale of Two Brothers - "far too great to be coincidental", as he put it. India-born author Maive Stokes noted the resurrective motif of the murdered children, and found parallels among European tales published during that time. Austrian consul Johann Georg von Hahn also remarked on a similar